Over the past few years (for a million different self and non-self inflicted reasons) I have become insanely uptight, often getting upset about things I don’t actually care about.

Deep down, I’m incredibly relaxed and calm, and nothing bugs me, because it’s all just life, and we’re all going to die in the end anyway, so who cares.

However, I must have decided somewhere along the way that I didn’t deserve to be happy, or perhaps just layers of crap started to form on top of the don’t-care-core, smothering it. I didn’t deal with things right there and then, so more and more crud formed, in the end it left me as some sort of walking guilt-sponge that feared everything.

I felt fear when wanting to do anything at all. I’ve always been indecisive, but this was crippling.

However, the biggest problem for me (consciously observed) was that my coding -the only thing I was sure I still enjoyed- was suffering.

I would sit in front of my PC knowing what I wanted to do, but filled with fear that it would be the wrong way. I felt like I had to think things through a million times before I even started typing. Once I did start typing, I thought “if this ever gets code reviewed, this is wrong, I could do this better…”, it was torture.

I like to think that I care very little of what others think of me, but in this state, I had started to care, or at least, started to judge myself in a way I thought others would, worse than the real thing because I’m far more harsh on myself as I wouldn’t hold back.

To me, coding has always been a creative thing, a silly statement to make perhaps, but there are those who see it as logic that can be done in one correct way only.And that’s the thing, I had become dulled, my creativity replaced by doubt.

Then I started working on Drumpster again, I sat down with the source, admiring how well I had thought things through. I had worked on it for quite a while, re-engineering it many times to be “better”, so much so that the functionality was almost non-existent.

Then came the day where I wanted to generate textures on start-up, needing to blur things, draw circles, basic primitive stuff. I had a buffer of bytes for the texture, needing to draw to them.

Something clicked.

All of a sudden my body was filled with a sensation of joy and freedom, my brain tsunami’ing full of memories from when I was younger, mode 13, 0xA0000000… I started typing like a maniac who types very well (considering he was never taught). It all just flowed through me, the joy of being creative, not giving a damn how gross the code ended up being (and man oh man, is it gross… awesome!).It was like the good old days, when I knew what I wanted as an end goal, discovering how to program what I wanted along the way, with little thought towards architecture or style that had been dictated to me.

Since then, I have been trying to deal with things about/involving me that I know have been wrong for years, talking about them with the awesome people in my life, sitting in my head thinking a lot, crying in the shower like Ace Ventura, zoning out during meetings with the squirrels more than usual.

I also created a new program, my HelperMonkeyBot (coming to a download near you soon… if you dare!)… also of extremely dubious technical Kwality… but it works, was fun to write, and continues to be fun to hack in.

It gives me confidence and strength I need to talk about things, to see that they aren’t all my fault, and to realise that I don’t care, despite being conditioned to care and worry about every single thing.

So while I’m nowhere near the sugar-explosion-hyperactivity me of old, and I’m still wracked with fear, I’m working through this, coding with a smile on my face, finally able to start dealing with things, fortunate enough to have someone awesome who listens and talks sense to me.

And sure, work is still work, where I code professionally and do the right thing, but my personal life is just that, it’s mine, no one else’s, so screw you all.